P.L. Travers, creator of Mary Poppins, in costume as Shakespearean fairy queen Titania. Picture: Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW.

FROM the days of Steele Rudd through to a new generation of best-sellers such as Nick Earls, Queensland writers have helped define the Australian experience the way Charles Chauvel did with film.

Bundaberg-born Vance Palmer (1885-1959) worked in most genres before making his mark with The Passage, set in a Queensland fishing village.

Ronald McKie (1909-1991), born in Toowoomba, was a war correspondent before turning to novel writing. He won a Miles Franklin award for his 1974 novel The Mango Tree, which told of a year in a Bundaberg boyhood in 1917.

Xavier Herbert (1901-1984) was born in WA but lived near Cairns for almost 40 years, a setting which helped him produce his 1975 epic on northern Australia, Poor Fellow My Country.

Thea Astley, born in Brisbane in 1925, is a three-time winner of the Miles Franklin Award who established her reputation with The Slow Natives (1965) and who wrote compellingly on the treatment of Aborigines in colonial Queensland in A Kindness Cup. She died in August 2004.

Poet Oodgeroo Noonuccal in her open-air theatre on Stradbroke Island in 1975.

Oodgeroo Noonuccal (1920-1993), formerly known as Kath Walker, grew up with the Noonuccal tribe of Stradbroke Island, experiences which informed her poetry in books such as My People and Stradbroke Dreamtime.

Thomas Shapcott, born in Ipswich in 1935, became one of Australia's best-known poets. In his novel Hotel Bellevue, the central characters take part in a protest over the destruction of the Brisbane landmark.

Poet and conservationist Judith Wright lived at Mt Tamborine for much of her life. She wrote forcefully on the impact of European immigration on Aboriginal culture.

David Rowbotham, born in Toowoomba, and Rodney Hall, who grew up in Brisbane, became two of Australia's most respected poets.

Geelong-born Bruce Dawe, who moved to Queensland to teach in the 1970s, showed his ear for laconic Australian speech and sympathy for the common man in Sometimes Gladness.

Few writers have captured the essence of Queensland like David Malouf. He was born in Brisbane in 1934 and his first novel, Johnno, evokes a city half lost.

But there is little doubt about the most popular literary creation by a Queenslander. P.L. Travers, author of Mary Poppins, was born Helen Lyndon Goff in Maryborough in 1899. As the daughter of a bank manager – just like the father in Poppins – she lived as a child in Lisson Grove, Wooloowin.

Painter Lloyd Rees (1895-1988), above, grew up in Brisbane but moved to Sydney in 1919. His long career earned him respect as the doyen of Australian landscape painters.

An adventurous spirit took Scotsman Ian Fairweather (1891-1974) from Canada to China, Southeast Asia, Sandgate and Cairns before he found Bribie Island, where the reclusive genius was left in peace to paint for his last 20 years.

Painter Vida Lahey (1982-1968), right, won acclaim in London and Paris before returning to Brisbane to continue her prolific career – she produced more than 2000 works.